Administrator Access authentication redirect loop

[Julia_Davies]

When attempting to go to the administrator pages, it asks me to validate my credentials. Once I verify my credentials, I am redirected back to the login validation page instead of the to the administrator pages. I have tried clearing my cache/restarting browser, but to no avail. We are currently using v7.12.3. This has been an issue in the past (in previous versions as well), but I was usually able to brunt force my way through; brunt force no longer works. 

[Adrien Ragot _Requirement Yogi_]

I would suspect that a cookie can't be set, to keep the authentication:

• Are you using HTTPS on your website?
• Did you configure the base url in the administration?

Both those things can prevent a cookie from sticking, however I can't use https on my machine, so I can't check whether this entirely solves the problem.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Julia,

Sorry to hear you are having this problem here.  It sounds like Jira is having a problem trying to handle this websudo authentication prompt.   By chance are you using a 3rd party system to authenticate in Jira?   I have seen a similar problem experienced by other systems using 3rd party system like OKTA to handle Jira authentication.  In those cases, it seemed that OKTA was able to login users to Jira with its own authenticator, but didn't seem to be able to correctly handle this websudo (aka Administrator access) check.

It might be worth trying to disable this websudo feature in Jira as a means to test out this problem.  There are steps on how to do this in Disabling secure administrator sessions.  This will require direct access to the Jira server, and to restart Jira for this setting change to take effect.

If you don't want to use that as a work-around here, I would be interested to see what sort of logs are generated in the $JIRAHOME/log/atlassian-jira.log file at the time this scenario happens.  I am expecting there to be some kind of ERROR or WARN level log message here that might give us more of a clue about what is causing this strange behavior in this case.

Thanks

Andy

[Julia_Davies]

Hi Andrew,

We are not using a 3rd party system to authenticate as far as I'm aware. I tried disabled the secure check and that seems to have fixed it, but long term, I'd prefer that to not be the solution.

The atlassian-jira.log does not seem to log anything in response to my authentication attempt.

The following logs respond:
*atlassian-jira-security.log
*atlassian-analytics.log
*access_log

Another interesting tidbit (I just discovered): if I hit "cancel" after validating once, it appropriately forwards me to the correct administrator function.

Thanks!

Julia

[Julia_Davies]

Oop! The interesting tidbit only works for the "Projects" section. Bizarre!